Patriarchy, Motherhood, and the Search for Meaning
India has just surpassed China as the most populous country in the world. What role has patriarchal pronatalism played in spurring this growth?
If autonomy is a basic human right, why do many women have little or no choice when it comes to motherhood? Do women know they have a choice? Why roles do patriarchy, religion, and the free market play in institutionalizing marriage and motherhood, and what influence does that have on women's lives and identities? And how might we reimagine the widest sense of family-making and spiritual kinship that includes our love for all humans and more-than-humans? These are some of the questions we explore in this episode with Dr. Amrita Nandy, India-based feminist, research, and writer and author of the book Motherhood and Choice: Uncommon Mothers, Childfree Women.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Amrita Nandy 0:00
All human experience and phenomena are constructed, fundamentally made of flux and therefore impermanent. And yet our untrained minds keep dragging us to these very sites that dazzle with the promise of fulfillment. But to come back to pronatalism, I think mindful family making and living can help us know deeply that we're not just responsible for our own bags of skin and body and our babies, but also the future of all beings that inhabit the Earth. And it's this widest sense of family, of camaraderie, of companionship ,of love for all humans and more than humans. I think that's the more exciting family making and kinship that a truly liberal and liberated discourse invites us towards.
Alan Ware 0:47
That was today's guest, Dr. Amrita Nandi, who has pioneered some of the most pathbreaking research examining the role of pronatalism within Indian culture in her latest book Motherhood and Choice. We explore some key questions from Dr. Nandy's research in today's interview such as, how can women live fully? And if autonomy is critical for humans, why do women have little or no choice vis-a-vis motherhood?
Nandita Bajaj 1:20
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:43
And I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot, and their combined devastating impacts on social, reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice. But before we move on today's guest, we've got some listener feedback from Charles in Minnesota. Charles says thanks so much for your excellent interview with Carl Safina. I was so impressed with it that I listened to it twice. Carl Safina's message that other species have their own unique cultures, their own highly evolved systems of communication and cooperation needs to be heard and understood much more broadly. Perhaps if it were we humans would repent of our foolish arrogance and relentlessly terrorizing and exterminating the myriad beautiful creatures with whom we share the planet. Thank you for your good work and sharing Carl Safina's message and thereby endorsing a more sane and responsible way of life for us humans. Thanks for those kind words, Charles. And now moving on to today's interview which is especially timely as India has just overtaken China as the most populous country in the world.
Nandita Bajaj 2:56
Dr. Amrita Nandy is an India-based researcher and writer whose work on gender, rights, and culture has been published in national and international books, journals, and newspapers. She has taught gender and sexuality to postgraduate students in Delhi, and was, til recently, a fellow at His Holiness the Dalai Lama's Foundation for Universal Responsibility where she studied the intersection of social justice and spirituality. Her doctoral research on women's choices vis-a-vis motherhood and mothering won her the 2013-14 Fox Fellowship at Yale University and is the subject of her book, Motherhood and Choice: Uncommon Mothers, Childfree Women. Winner of the 2015 Laadli National Media and Advertising award for gender sensitivity, Amrita has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a master's from the University of Oxford, UK. Currently, she works with human rights and feminist organizations and looks after her elderly parents and plants while trying to fuse it all with the contemplative spiritual. And now on to our interview with Dr. Nandy. Amrita, we are absolutely thrilled to have you here in our virtual studio. I've been reading your work for a number of years, and this is an interview I've been waiting to have with you for a really long time. And Alan and I are both so excited that we get to do that today. Welcome.
Amrita Nandy 4:22
Thank you so much.
Nandita Bajaj 4:24
As you know, Amrita, I've been developing my own scholarship on the impact of pronatalism on women's identities and lives, but also on population growth and the resulting environmental crises. I've read the works of feminists from around the world working specifically on the issue of motherhood, but yours is one that I'm personally most drawn to. In large part because we both grew up in India, believing in the same cultural story that motherhood was our destiny, it was our identity, and we both have found our own ways of challenging patriarchy. So we're excited to welcome you today, not just to our podcast, but also as our newest advisor for Population Balance. And this interview also lines up with another major cultural event: India surpassing China this year as the most populated country in the world. So we'd love to dive into your book, the latest book, Motherhood and Choice: Uncommon Mothers, Childfree Women. You've noted in your work that Indian feminist scholarship has a complex, layered study of marriage, of caste, community, and sexuality, but a rather huge neglect of motherhood. You are one of the very few feminists writing about pronatalism while living within a deeply patriarchal culture. What inspired you to dedicate most of your research to this work?
Amrita Nandy 6:00
Thank you, Nandita. Thank you for that question and the introduction, and I'm really excited to be on board and to be talking with you and Alan today. Now to your question. I think as a woman and a researcher, I was both intrigued and moved by the many nodes of silence in, on, and around the issue of motherhood and mothering. Specifically, voluntary non-motherhood or childfreeness. I also felt troubled by the absence of nonjudgmental conversations on women's ambivalence or disinterest or even regret towards motherhood by our own inability to separate norms and normative discourse from questions of choice and autonomy. And also by the difficulties faced by what I would imagine as non-patriarchal models of family life, and so on. And I realize that all of these were relevant yet under-researched issues. There was so much that was felt and thought by a spectrum of women, and yet not being said out loud for fear of stigma or mockery or judgment. And women were policing themselves in not thinking those thoughts, not walking those roads to explore a question, let alone defy, even when this was not anti-motherhood or antinatalist, but rather a very deeply informed choices around motherhood or what I would call conscientious pronatalism. So my doctoral research focused specifically on women's agency and subjectivity, recently motherhood and mothering, including the choice to say no to these roles. So my work asks if motherhood within pronatalist cultures can ever be a choice, and if so, to what degree? Do and can women imagine it as a choice? And then how do they enact that choice, if at all? So I explored these questions through ethnographic research among Indian women, through notions of the body of caregiving work, both paid and unpaid, at home and outside, and the family. And I do this through a feminist theoretical framework. Now I arrived at this subject, after having been in that space myself, in my personal journey as a woman and a potential mother, and redefining motherhood, which I essentially see as nurturing and caregiving, seems like personally and politically significant to me, not just for women, but as culturally and ecologically relevant for our times. But also interestingly, over the years, this work has gathered for itself new meanings as I came into contact with the teachings of some wise gurus like the Buddha, who also affirms the needs to question and to know deeply our choices.
Nandita Bajaj 8:58
Wonderful. That's really lovely, how personally derived this research is based on your own journey of questioning some of these norms that we have been assigned specially as women. And I also love that you are coming to this place through some of the contemplative work that you're doing, which does really force us to question more deeply bigger questions about our own existence. Why are we here? What are we doing with our lives? What brings us meaning? And we've been told for millennia that what brings us meaning, especially as women, is our role as mothers. And as you said, caregiving and mothering are intertwined as deeply inherent qualities of women, though we know they are not, they are deeply gendered qualities that have created this divide between men and women. So thank you for sharing that.
Alan Ware 9:58
So you start your book, Motherhood and Choice, with the concept you call maternormativity. Can you start by defining what the term maternormativity means?
Amrita Nandy 10:09
Yeah, I thought of the term maternormativity to be able to encapsulate that whole wide and dominant paradigm that we use women as mothers. So that term points to really a set of norms that assume, expect, and even persuade all of those born as females to be women, and all those who see themselves as women to be mothers. So it's about that overwhelming maternalization of the female identity that's produced and sustained by, as Foucault suggested, the language-knowledge-power nexus. So, the maternormative is the idea that females are naturally maternal, and thereby motherhood, mothering, and other forms of care come naturally to them, and then should be their primary or their main pursuit.
Alan Ware 11:07
And how is the notion of motherhood been romanticized in Indian society? And how has that been linked to notions of nation and morality?
Amrita Nandy 11:16
I think the romanticization of motherhood and its linkages with the nation and morality can be true for many cultures, many nations in periods of time besides India. Now the trope of the nation as the mother, I think, is a soft strategy. It's meant to evoke in us a form of deep love and duty towards the nation as the mother and women as the all-giving symbol of the nation. It's a high moral position. It has its beauty, but it can be and has been used to corner women into rather limited and limiting roles and identities. And history is replete with examples of how women as mothers or potential mothers, real and symbolic mothers, have been mobilized, or rather, even weaponized, or have mobilized or weaponized themselves to speak up for the nation state, or the meme of the motherland is deployed, I think, to whip up nationalism, it's also hatred against the so-called anti-nationals or minorities. And this happens by making motherhood the site of deep investment of the role in identities of immense symbolism. It's invested in high morality and ideals of, of service and love, care, and sacrifice. And this investment in this mythology and romance is collective, it's consistent work. This work's done by women themselves, the family, community, and then in religious and popular discourse, or in didactic literature, in poetry. Women are pinned as agents of morality. And this is how we're influencing how women see themselves and position themselves and how they make the choices that they do. So really, it's a cycle of co-creation, and it's resistance, which just continues over a period of time and culture.
Alan Ware 13:07
Right. Yeah, as you mentioned, the millennia of influence through religions of all kinds, whether Hindu, Muslim, or Christian, with Mary being the icon there. And then do you do mention the nationalist independence movement in India had quite a bit of motherhood iconography images, right?
Amrita Nandy 13:28
Absolutely. And I think visuals do the work pretty effectively, don't they? And so do song and dance and poetry. I think they evoke in us some very deep, affective spaces, you know, they get pulled out. And it works both within the family, but also the larger landscape of duty and belonging. And this could release an idea such as nationalism, which now in current times, again, across continents, and across national borders, are being used for very dangerous uses.
Alan Ware 14:01
Yes, a key feature of your work is a belief that choice and autonomy are fundamental human goods that are essential for people to thrive. And we certainly would agree with that. So how does maternormativity in the broader sense, as you're seeing it, undermine that choice and autonomy?
Amrita Nandy 14:18
I think it's in the nature of norms, and these could be social, political, cultural norms of gender and so on - the entire range of norms - to shape our attitudes, perspectives, and actions. That's really the work of norms and normativity. And likewise, maternormativity influences or nudges, coerces, even pressures us women into certain directions by telling us what is the acceptable role, the acceptable performance, the acceptable stance, behavior, demeanor, for us to take as women and mothers. Now this is not to say that we as humans or women are passive agents. There is resistance and the dynamic it brings. Yet, I believe that motherhood, like the love for the nation or like the norm of heterosexuality, has been the more unquestioned substantive norm for human lives. And in this case, in the case of maternormativity, for adult women's imagination, their selfhood, their aspirations, as well as for society's imagination and aspiration for girls and women. And it is such influence that can hinder our ability to question or to explore other parts. And another reason is that conformity to what's called the herd behavior brings better chances of acceptance within those communities, whereas nonconformity can be threatening and alienating. And what we humans, or rather most humans, seek so deeply is to be liked, to be valued for who we are and how we are. And given this, it's not easy for us to seek our own, to go against the normative, in this case, the maternormative, and then question the values or the politics of motherhood and mothering, or disagree with its ways. And so women can have very little choice and autonomy vis-a-vis this powerful discourse of and around motherhood, and as I call it, maternormative.
Alan Ware 16:22
And to what extent do you see it being a factor of patriarchy and the values of men and the power of men to create this strong norm that then a lot of women internalize? And that can be difficult to tease apart, right?
Amrita Nandy 16:37
Absolutely. But to that, Alan, I'd like to say that patriarchy is embodied across genders. For example, I could identify as a queer person, and yet I could have imbibed and assimilated in my psyche and my behaviors, some very deeply patriarchal ideas, and therefore, in my supposedly non-heteronormative relationship, I could still be practicing very patriarchal behaviors. Women, for example, could be very patriarchal also. So yes, of course, patriarchy is, you know, it's the domination of masculinity, of male ideas, and so on. But it can be far more complex in it's practice.
Nandita Bajaj 17:21
Yeah. And speaking of one of the institutions that has, as you said, been imbibed across genders, but even across the political spectrum, from hyper left to hyper right, is the institution of marriage. And within the context of India, you've noted that marriage is seen as one of the most significant events in the life of women. And even though norms may have loosened in some sections of society, marriage remains the only socially legitimate model for both sexuality and reproduction for women. How does the institution of marriage, particularly in India, undermine personal and reproductive autonomy?
Amrita Nandy 18:06
Like you rightly said, Nandita, that sexuality is really part of that canvas. In fact, it's at the core of marriage and marriage as a norm. So for childbearing for example, marriage is the only road for most Indians. It's the most acceptable way to start a family. And often marriage is seen as the license to be sexually active. Most marriages are still arranged by the family, by which one means that it's the parents or the relatives, mostly male, in traditional communities and families, which is a large part of the country, who get to choose, who get to have a say in who your partner is. Having said that, to a much lesser degree, in cities or in the urban pockets of the country where women have had more access to education and are financially independent, there is the autonomy to select one's partner. And again, you could be highly educated as a woman but your family or your community could still nurture some traditional ideas and their caste or religion, especially religion, now in the times that we're all living in across national borders, has sadly become a marker of identity that carries a lot of currency. So if I choose a partner who is from a supposedly minority community, it's going to not be very acceptable, and that's really very, very tragic.
Nandita Bajaj 19:42
And Amrita, moving on to your research. It's quite unique in that you're capturing the experiences of people who are challenging pronatalist cultural norms, whom you call in your book, outliers of motherhood. They're either foregoing motherhood or they are taking unconventional paths to motherhood, and you've split the group into three. One is the experiences of people who are childfree by choice, another who are ambivalent about motherhood, whom you call fence sitters. And then the third group, mix of voluntary and unconventional mothers. Could you walk us through the experiences of all of these different groups of people that you interviewed and what were some of the findings and common themes that you noticed?
Amrita Nandy 20:32
The experience of the childfree, to begin with, this is a very diverse collection which comprises those who felt stigma, or felt stigma to different degrees and in different and similar ways, as well as those who found more support for their off-beat, non-normative life choices. And yet, they all experienced the power of what I'm calling the maternominative, which is when they resisted the push to be mothers, or when others responded with surprise or alarm to their unusual stance. For example, some women had partners who were supportive of the desire to be childfree, while others had parents who were horrified that their daughter rejected motherhood. Some childfree women had to lie to others about their choice, and pose their childfreeness as their childlessness, or as a biological incapacity to bear a child. Some women could speak freely about it within like a like-minded circle of friends. I remember a childfree woman who found immense moral support when the spiritual gurus she followed said that marriage and motherhood are worldly pursuits, and not at all necessary for spiritual growth, but could instead be hindrances. And since the childfree are not a homogenous lot, like I said earlier, they could represent varied political interests, too. Yet in my study, which was limited in its scope, and selective in its scope, I found that activists of many shades, for example, feminists, human rights activists, environmentalists - that they tend to choose childfreeness, because clearly, it's aligned with the politics of devoting their time, money, and energy to social, political, and ecological causes. And most did not regret their decision. They were confident and happy about their choices and had their respective passions that engage them. Again, in that limited circle, most childfree women had higher degrees, if many, if not most, were postgraduates, and they belonged to the middle and upper-middle classes, and had some degree of exposure to the idea of women's rights, autonomy, feminism, and so on. And although I have not spoken directly to as many women who one can call childless, I spent some time with women who experienced childbirth or adopted children after several years of being without children or trying to have children. And so from that small window, it seems that the experiences of the childfree and those we call childless can be distinct. Obviously, one chose to live without children, while the other was made to live without children by circumstances. And women and families can find it painful to bear the sense of absence of children, when children constitute a core identity and purpose for their lives. And remember that a lot of the sense of loss is created by the discourse around motherhood, and women's supposedly highest and best purpose in life. And so this kind of stigma and pity around the childless, too, adds to this selfhood, which is missing from the lives of the childfree. That said, since impermanence of experiences is an essential part of the human life, it may not be surprising if the childless may feel like the childfree at some point of their lives, and the childfree relates to the childless for a moment or more. The other group is the fence sitters. And I find them also to be a rather interesting lot because I think they can signify, very acutely, the difficulty of choosing either path. To be a mother and to have to dedicate many years of one's life without much support by the state or the community, and certainly not the market unless you're willing to empty your pockets in times that are terribly expensive, and so have to slog through paid employment to make caregiving possible. It may also seem tough to them to decide against motherhood, I think, because it can bring up anxieties about the uncertainties of the future, especially in aging body and mind, the vulnerabilities and loneliness that being elderly brings and so on. And so I saw women who were torn, women who felt pulled in both directions and couldn't quite decide. There were others who are waiting for their own body and minds to place for them a clearer call, like a sharper call in that their urge to mother was not that strong. Some were leaning towards being childfree, but were not able to accept or articulate that. Another woman was, for example, so content with her life, so as to not want to alter it through a major change, and a child does represent a really major change. So here too, not all women had the blessing of a circle where they could share this dilemma without being judged. And this aspect, this experience they shared with the childfree.
Nandita Bajaj 25:46
Right, that's fascinating. And I like the distinction that you are drawing between the childless and the childfree, and how for the childless, depending on how they've processed that status, that, as you said, was not a choice, it was forced on them. And you know how for some of them they might come out of that and start relating to that new status from a position of freedom rather than lack. But there is something about childlessness which I think pronatalism perpetuates, that makes you hold on to that feeling of lack, of having failed much more deeply than some of the other life choices may. It prevents people from then exploring other ways of finding fulfillment in life and really challenging some of the norms that tell us that that's the only thing.
Amrita Nandy 26:41
That's so beautifully captured and such a complex idea that you put out, Nandita. It reminded me of a rather well known journalist who I interviewed for this research. And her narrative is part of the book, of course, with a pseudonym. And I remember her saying that she was single, by which I mean, never married, and at the peak of her career, and a rather successful one as a journalist, and had also started working on her first novel. And she said all her friends, her close friends, by that time were married, and most had become parents. And she saw how over time, that she wasn't quite invited to or felt out of place at social gatherings with these very friends that she'd grown up with and was very close to because the children somehow occupied the center of the lives of these friends. So for example, she said at birthday parties, she wasn't invited, whereas all of the other friends would go to, for example, watch movies, kiddie movies, and she felt left out and she said it was that that in some ways pushed her towards adopting a child. And now years after that adoption, and having also relished and cherished the joys that motherhood and mothering can bring, and one cannot, and perhaps should not deny those, she said that if she thought deeply about what she was feeling at that time, reflected and paused, and so on, she may not have decided to adopt. And I found that to be such an authentic, deeply reflective response to how we humans are constantly pulled and pushed into choices.
Alan Ware 28:30
So your third group of focus was a mix of voluntary and unconventional mothers and what are some examples of the unconventional mothers that you interviewed?
Amrita Nandy 28:40
These unconventional mothers are really an assortment of motherhood and mothering arrangements, of motherhood and mothering choices and identities. Each one of them is responding to or resisting a set of normative ideas around the institution of what I see as patriarchal motherhood. Now the examples of unconventional mothers I interviewed are, say, those who dissociate motherhood with the woman's body or the mother's body, or dissociate motherhood with the family's genes or blood ties. These are women who chose not to give birth, but adopt. Another variation of this category of mothers I met were those who had a biological child, and then also adopted one or more. There were single women, by which I mean unmarried single, who too adopted kids and raise these adopted kids with their partners. These partners could be lesbian partners or male partners or even childhood friends, and to these kinds of adoptive mothers, you know, married, single, and so on - it is care. It's caregiving. It's the affective nature of that relationship. It's the values that one gifts the child that makes the child your own, and not simply one's blood and genetic ties. And this, I find, to be such a radical and beautiful message and redefinition of kinship and belonging for those of us who are obsessed with having their own or genetically related children. And then there are women who chose to give birth without being married, or mothers outside of marriage. They chose motherhood, but rejected marriage. And in doing so I think they brought the mother-child relationship outside of its patriarchal dominion or canvas. However, since it's not easy for all such women and their children to gain acceptance by society, some had to introduce the child as an adopted one so as to not impact the child's social process. And then I also met among other sex worker mothers to understand how they navigate the motherhood symbolism - the good mother trope, the mother is the good woman trope - with the discourse around sex workers or the bad woman trope, that sex work is dirty, and therefore sex workers are dirty, too. And some of these sex workers deployed their choice hyphen compulsion to be in sex work as the extent to which they can go to be a good mother. And I found that very interesting that I am being a sex worker to actually provide for my child, and therefore, am I not a good mother? Or, for example, some of them said they were keeping their own daughters away from sex work. Now again, am I not being a good mother by doing that? And this I found to be very fascinating.
Alan Ware 31:37
Do they have a particular personality strength? It would seem like a lot of these unconventional mothers would have to be somewhat unique to be that strong in the face of these pressures, or did they seem like a cross section of everyday people?
Amrita Nandy 31:52
Yeah, I think there's certainly a streak of self-actualization that defies the pressure to be conformative. There is certainly that. And I guess that comes from one's exposure to ideas, from one's exposure to men and women in the family, outside teachers, certainly feminism. But having said that, there are also feminists who are, what I would call really organic feminists - I don't have to study feminist theory to want to claim that space for myself, to claim that identity. There are women in rural parts of the country who perhaps have never been schooled, but through their own folk wisdom, have been able to muster that strength to walk their own path, or to walk a path that's less traveled.
Nandita Bajaj 32:42
One comment on what you just said about organic feminism, it's a really nice term because it captures the strength of those who have, as you said, traditional wisdom to challenge some of these principles of subjugation and oppression and defying these norms to define themselves and possibly help define their daughters in different ways. And I know in my own study of feminism, it does seem like feminist ideas, for the most part, are only available to the privileged who can go to school, continue on with graduate and postgraduate work and study some of these scholarly people. And I really just appreciate this nuance that you brought also of recognizing people for centuries who have been, in their own way, pushing against culture but didn't ever get the kind of recognition that a lot of the well known feminists have.
Amrita Nandy 33:41
Absolutely, absolutely. I'm so glad it resonated with you. Yeah, I think I just wanted to say that the dominant understanding and even practice of marriage as an institution, and again, I'm saying this for cultures across the globe and not just about India, is that it is heteronormative and patriarchal, by which I mean that it divides roles in certain biology-based, essentialist, and reductive ways, and it does not allow for women in particular to explore other possibilities. And one of the examples that I didn't mention earlier is about marital rape. You know, why else would marital rape not even be considered as such in our country? The right to say no to sex to your husband has even been seen by the judiciary as a threat to and the term here is conjugality. So I think marital rape sort of, and the feminist push to bring it on board, is an important point to how sacred the institution of marriage is and its definition is here in India currently.
Alan Ware 34:49
So in another one of your articles, you discuss the role of the fertility industry in perpetuating the fetishization of biological motherhood as being more natural and real. Can you share how the fertility industry is further reinforcing these patriarchal and pronatalist biases?
Amrita Nandy 35:06
The reproductive industry rests on the very ideal of women as mothers and the heteronormative family as the norm with procreation and the child as the goal of the married couple. And so the industry has to tout this image, they tout it to sell it, to survive, and make profits. And they have a stake, therefore, in the marriage industry as well, which too, is based, of course, on the idea of compulsory heterosexuality, family making, consumption, and therefore profits. And so you see how the market and profit-making, family, and marriage are all really a nexus. The traditional idea of the real family as one with a common blood pool, and genetic ties as the real thing, is exploited and promoted by this industry to build its client base. And to understand this, all one has to do is read and watch their advertisements. The language is crafted to evoke the image of the blissful family, the complete family with the mother, child, and father. And as that being the right composition for what we define as family.
Alan Ware 36:15
Part of the huge concern is with the genetic line of the father and a patrilineal society to make sure the father's genetic lineage is, through the male line, is carried forth, right?
Amrita Nandy 36:28
Yeah. And this is tied to caste and therefore to blood purity, to faith, and religion. And all of these very regressive markers of supposedly human identity, when wisdom would tell us that really identity cannot rest on all of this - it's what you stand for and how you live that truly marks who you are and where you come from.
Alan Ware 36:51
Can you also speak to some of the broader ethical issues surrounding some of the major activities within the fertility industry like the in-vitro fertilization, surrogacy, egg donorship, embryo adoption, and the practice of baby selling?
Amrita Nandy 37:05
I find it very problematic because it promotes a very narrow eugenic idea of kinship instead of expanding and redefining what kinship or belonging or love and care could mean including the parent-child tie, and how it can be fully signify all of these things. I think we've used cutting edge technology to cling and bring back our very primitive and regressive ideas about blood as the marker of real relationships. This is my primary concern. Besides, since these are expensive treatments, they too, like much else about the neoliberal world, they too exclude the underprivileged. Also, these technologies can be very invasive, and they hurt women's overall wellbeing in the long term. Yet this aspect gets overlooked in our obsessive and myopic longing for a child. And lastly, but rather critically, I think that this grasping and craving for a child is built on the conventional and erroneous idea that the child will bring happiness and meaning into the parents lives in a way that other choices and paths may not. And this prioritizing, this understanding, can be very disappointing or even heartbreaking for both the parents and the child or children on whose shoulders then rests the weight of the parents many expectations, just to put it in a nutshell.
Alan Ware 38:35
In this valuing, prioritizing genetic biological lineage, how has that impacted adoption rates in India?
Amrita Nandy 38:44
I cannot speak from empirical evidence here. And I wonder if there's any study that does, I'm not aware of such work in India, but for those who can afford expensive ART treatments and such like, and for those who believe in the parent-child tie as necessarily genetic, even the idea of adoption is not entertained, because they can buy their way into parenthood. It's only those who are open to adoption and see it as a progressive alternative to procreation were not impacted by the industry's promise and dazzle. But we do know that the numbers are not that many, and we know this from the sheer numbers that line up at ART facilities and fertility centers in India and abroad. And ARTs offer the promise of what is seen as real parenthood, i.e. biological parenthood, whereas adoption is seen as the path of compromise or altruism by many.
Alan Ware 39:44
I saw one estimate or two estimates that put it at twenty-nine to thirty-one million orphaned children in India.
Amrita Nandy 39:52
Yes, one would have to look at the source, but it's definitely a huge number. But remember, adoption is practiced through government channels. And adoption takes really long, several years. There are queues there as well. So there are queues outside adoption centers. But the queues at the ART centers are far, far longer. But it's also much quicker to get a child than to adopt a child because the government and the bureaucracy, it's a huge machinery for one. And also adoption, like I explore in my work and in the book, adoption, unfortunately, is still based on skin color, looks, age of the child. Many adoptive women I spoke to said that they would wait for the adoption agency to offer them as young child as possible, ideally, a child under two or under one so that they could announce the child as their own, so that they could bond with the child, so that they could shape the head of the child, and so on. So there is that instinct, or that urge to have a child look like you was so deep for some of these women, that they were trying to somehow latch on to the deep desire that this adopted child be as similar, at least in looks, to what a biological child could have been like.
Alan Ware 41:19
And is India trying to become a center point of this fertility industry regionally or globally?
Amrita Nandy 41:26
Yes, India has been and continues to be one of those global hotspots for baby making. And we see a lot of couples from other countries who queue up for babies and for fertility. Yes, that's true. I don't have the numbers. I mean, the book did and that's when I had looked up the numbers, but I haven't in a while, but it's certainly the case. Also, because it's cheaper. It's not just that we have good doctors and good facilities, it works out cheaper for you to have an IVF treatment in the country. Until the time commercial surrogacy was on, it was some years ago that the government, in its very nationalistic way said that non-Indian nationals cannot come to the country to have their babies. But before that, you had a lot of foreign nationals and foreign couples hiring Indian women's wombs to have children, and surrogacy is in itself a really complex subject, and a lot of books and a lot of research continues to go into it. But yes, it's quite a complex mess.
Nandita Bajaj 42:31
Rightly said. What has also happened within the industry is what started out as a medical field of research has now become commercialized and a multibillion dollar industry. It's predatory in nature, because it's preying upon people who already feel deeply stigmatized because of an incapacity to reproduce, and promising the happily ever after that one can achieve through biological parenthood. Another fascinating thing that I don't think a lot of even feminists are connecting is how really traditional and patriarchal societies, who are kind of obsessed with natural reproduction, and religion for the most part, for example, would reject anything that is not natural when it comes to parenthood. But when it comes to perpetuating nationalistic agendas or xenophobic agendas, then it seems like all bets are off. If technology can help you get there, then great. You wouldn't consider the same forces to be that accepting of new technologies unless it helped you further your own goals.
Amrita Nandy 43:47
Absolutely. And I think we women, we're unable to see this because we're so deeply conditioned by the self worth that gets attached to our bodies. We're so blinded by these essentialist discourse around our bodies, and therefore, by the insecurities that the body and its ideal brings up. That we're unable to see it the way you so beautifully put it, Nandita. We're unable to see how these aspects crisscross into our lives, and how we've become puppets to these very discourses. The discourse of religion, the discourse of the market, the discourse of the ideal woman, the ideal family, of romance, of the purpose of one's life, or the meaning of having a female body, and so on.
Nandita Bajaj 44:39
Yeah. And something that you brought up in a previous interview you had with us was more of a rhetorical question is, what does the hunger for a child really say about our inner lives? Must biology be allowed to determine women's lives? It's a powerful question that we think that any potential parents should be asking themselves. We obviously support and believe that once people have done the necessary work to explore all of the different forces that are at play that are pushing us towards certain life paths, whether it is marriage, children, in and of themselves, they're not wrong to engage in because they can be deeply meaningful. I think our role really is to question the institutions and see to what degree do they line up with our values and deepest desires? Can you speak to the ethics of procreation as it relates to that? To our potential children, other beings on the planet, and just the planet itself?
Amrita Nandy 45:42
That's a very fantastic encapsulation of such a complex, tiered, layered set of phenomena and ideas, Nandita. Thank you for putting it so brilliantly. I think that question reveals as much as it poses, because it is that supposedly intimate aspect of one's life, baby-making, family making - it ties that to the planet and all the other sentient beings that live by it, on it, with it. And it's these frames, they will never separate, they will never distinct, but it is, I think, in our typical human delusory short-sightedness that we've not been able to see far and deep. The hunger for a child, like any other craving for happiness and fulfillment, reveals a hope, a deep wish, an acute desire for an easing of the anxieties, the boredom, the confusion, the search for meaning and purpose in our lives. The hunger is very human, it's relatable, it's legitimate, it shows how vulnerable we are and how we're almost held ransom by our own inner wiring, our psychological machinery. It also exposes the essential existential angst that we all live with or go through at some points in our lives, and which is what drives us to this and that. That insatiable hunger for a child. And yet this hunger's satiation may not be that, it may not ease the angst, even that fulfillment with the presence of a child, it may not ease that angst, because I think it's human nature to relentlessly seek, feel fulfilled for a period of time, and then feel bored and dissatisfied, and then want more or want different, like the Buddha and other wise teachers have so rightly informed us. So the solution itself can make us more hungry. The food itself can make us more hungry is what I'm trying to get at. We bind ourselves and the planet in tighter and tighter knots by clinging for more of the same. And here of course, I'm borrowing and paraphrasing from our many contemplative wisdom traditions to argue that all human experience and phenomena are constructed and fundamentally made of flux and therefore impermanent. And yet our untrained minds keep dragging us to these very sites that dazzle with the promise of fulfillment. But to come back to pronatalism, I think mindful family-making and living can help us know deeply that we're not just responsible for our own bags of skin and body and our babies, but also the future of all beings that inhabit the Earth. And it's this widest sense of family, of camaraderie, of companionship, of love for all humans and more-than-humans. I think that's the more exciting family-making and kinship that a truly liberal and liberated discourse invites us towards. And for women in particular, I think biology can be destiny. And so for them to be conscious of these deeper but also uncomfortable truths of existence can be pretty liberating. Feminism can liberate us from the social, but the contemplative can liberate us from the fog of the human mind itself.
Nandita Bajaj 49:04
That's really well said.
Alan Ware 49:05
So in 2020, you co-authored an inequality report for Oxfam, which studied gender inequality in India. The report was titled Unpaid Care Work and Violence Against Women and Girls at a Crossroads: A Case for Behavior Change of Dominant Social Norms. So which populations did you study in India, and what were some of the major findings?
Amrita Nandy 49:29
The rural population in a city in Rajasthan and urban population in Delhi, lower income and high income families respectively. These were the populations that we studied in India. And while the study demonstrates that unpaid care work may be the cause of violence, it's more often the trigger for violence. And the study shows that causes for violence against women and girls are multiple and even the ideal caregiver may not escape violence. The root cause is undervaluing women, and not just their labor and intellect but also the value of their labor, both within the family and also in the labor market, as also women's subordination to men or women's lack of power within the household. Now there are degrees of acceptability we found of violence against women. Conflict with the spouse is often seen as an unavoidable part of marital life. So any violence that follows it, any abuse that follows it, therefore can get condoned or even accepted. Yet physical violence is a lived reality for many women, both rural and urban. And this is true for across class. And our study shows that six out of eighteen men interviewed admitted to having been violent to their wives. Also, that cases of physical violence largely go unreported, or underreported, and the belief that women's duty towards the household and the family, their caregiving is their primary responsibility, this has deep social currency. Therefore, any supposed mistake made by women in their caregiving work, in the household, chores can be seen as deserving of punishment or violence, both by men and women. And these cases show that where unpaid care work is not the root cause, it does become a justification for violence because women are exclusively held accountable for it.
Alan Ware 51:32
Yeah, in the report, when you mentioned the percentages of girls and women aged fifteen to forty-nine who agreed that a husband is justified in hitting or beating a wife for neglecting house or children, that was almost a third said that was justified. And a third said disrespecting in-laws. So the girls very young, they're getting education, they're probably doing as well or better than boys in school, as they do in so many countries around the world, but they have to do so much care work, right? The girls at home and the boys are mostly exempt from that household work?
Amrita Nandy 52:08
Yes, and that's gender 101. That's how our lives get gendered, that anything to do with caregiving, with the household, with the kitchen belongs to the daughter, and then the wife, the mother, tied to women's biology. And that very report, for example, and some of the other pieces of research that I've done in other parts of the country, interestingly show that men who are willing to share household work with their wives or their mothers or sisters would still be ashamed to be seen publicly to be doing some of these tasks. That they would rather that their male friends or their peers not know that, for example, they wash clothes at home, and washing clothes or doing laundry, particularly, was seen as unmanly, or feminine. Yeah, this came up across cultural contexts.
Alan Ware 53:04
And in the report it mentioned 50% of women said men should not help in unpaid care work. So it's so much a part of many women's identity, that home sphere, that domestic sphere is the woman's sphere, it's kind of a role confusion that a lot of women feel too, right?
Amrita Nandy 53:22
Yes, because they could be mocked that they're asking or demanding that their husbands or brothers or sons are being pulled into this, whereas this is their work. And like I said earlier, patriarchy is really accepted by a lot of us across gender identities. And so this is women policing themselves, women trying to save their male relatives from mockery, and themselves from mockery. And this is how deeply gendered our lives become, and how unquestioned our everyday actions are.
Alan Ware 53:57
And is there still an expectation, it's a very patrilineal in the rural areas, right? Where the bride goes to the husband's family and is considered part of that family, kind of leaving her birth family?
Amrita Nandy 54:10
Yes, that's true. I won't say it's only in rural areas, it's rural and urban. That's part of the institution of marriage, its very definition. It's deeply patrilineal. And it continues to be even for a lot of educated women, educated with post-grad degrees, but with little exposure to ideas of, of human rights, of feminism, or the contemplative.
Alan Ware 54:35
So the married woman might be expected to take care of her in-laws and her own parents?
Amrita Nandy 54:40
So for the conventionally minded, the daughter becomes part of the marital family and that line of family, that patrilineal family, and if she has a brother, of course, her parents responsibility, their care giving belongs to the brother. If she doesn't have a brother, then her primary responsibility is to take care of the husband's parents and her own parents can take a backseat. That's the expectation. But women find ways to undo that, others cannot. In the more traditional family setup, that's how it is. That's the prioritization. That's the hierarchy.
Alan Ware 55:20
You mention in the report that education for a girl doesn't have much value in the marriage market compared to caste and economic status. Is that changing somewhat in the urban areas or with more educated people?
Amrita Nandy 55:34
Absolutely. I think in the academic circles, in the activist circles, in the progressive circles, caste religion is questioned. But again, you know, these circles are miniscule. They're a minority compared to what India would represent. And caste is, unfortunately, a very deeply lived reality.
Nandita Bajaj 55:55
Right. And some of the examples you were just giving from this Oxfam report reminded me of something you had said about how pronatalism is deeply institutionalized in that there's no infrastructure for elderly care in India. So a woman is expected to have a child so that the parents can have someone to take care of them when they get older because the government does not provide any kind of support system. So a lot of the burden of care work actually falls on women. And it's, as you said, it's unpaid care work. And, of course, the preference for a male child to go off of what you just said, you know, about a patrilineal expectation that the daughter becomes part of the husband's family. And so she's not really that valuable to parents because she doesn't belong to them in the first place, she's going to become someone else's, quote unquote, property. And so there's so much tied to the reduction of women in to not just reproductive vessels, but also institutionalized labor.
Amrita Nandy 57:08
Yes, the need to bear a child, the necessity to bear a child, to have a child and not just bear a child is deeply tied to the social settings here. There's barely any government provided childcare, and it's in shambles wherever it exists. And of course, elderly care is only, say in the last decade, is being offered by the market. It's expensive and is only afforded by a few. And so the fear and insecurity of being lonely, of being sick in your old age of living alone, and sickness and ailment and disease of dying alone, is a really traumatic idea that compels people into investing decades of their lives in raising children. And children are seen as an investment in a sense. It's a sad word to use, but it does have a grain of truth in that the presence of children could be one's buffer against all psychological and biological suffering that old age can bring. And yet, educated children pursuing their careers, higher education, and so on, often leave the nest as it were. And they're not around. That's another reality. And that's a very, very common sight across classes, across communities. And that its sites of employment, it's big cities, or the West where kids head to educate themselves and build their careers. And the hope that the child will be around when I'm old, is not often met. So that realization is dawning. And yet the desire and the hope lives on too. So it's a conflicted state.
Nandita Bajaj 58:56
Right. And it ties in quite strongly with the fact that women in India represent the smallest percentage of workforce participation even though you may become educated. This expectation that you must first be a caregiver, whether it is to your child, to your husband's family, etc., outweighs the desires or the autonomy of the woman who may wish to participate in other creative endeavors, including work. And so it's a complicated set of policies that continue to, at so many levels, disenfranchise women.
Amrita Nandy 59:39
Absolutely. And it's norms on one end, norms that we unquestioningly buy into, but it's also norms that the state is buying into. For example, for a very long time, childcare leave offered by the government of India could only be availed by women employees and not male employees. And I brought that up. And I question that in the book and the research. So it's a crisscross, very complex web of the market, the state norms, gender, patriarchy, playing into each other. And of course, our own existential questions of purpose and meaning and angst plays into it as well.
Nandita Bajaj 1:00:23
And Amrita, what are your thoughts on the connection between patriarchal pronatalism, gender inequity, and the fact that India is going to become the most populated country in the world this year? Do you see kind of a strong connection between pronatalism and population growth?
Amrita Nandy 1:00:44
Yeah, I certainly see a very deep, substantive relationship between pronatalism and the population numbers in the country. Pronatalism, of course, is driving us towards that. But like we said earlier in the conversation, there are a lot of other factors that drive pronatalism itself. If one were to imagine the state and the market redefining their roles in society, right from education of girls, to building their aspirations, to building their perspectives, to building male perspectives about gender, to providing elderly care, to offering childcare, I think we could see a rather different picture. So pronatalism is tied to all of these other forces of public measures, welfare measures by the government, as well as a reimagined hand of the market.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:44
It's a very complicated picture, and with reference to population, I know how sensitive a subject population is in India, especially within progressive circles. And we're finding that even here within our Western liberal circles, and I see pronatalism as the oldest form of population control, of reproductive control. And of course, one of the reasons population has become such a sensitive topic in India was also because of the horrific population control tactics that were used in the 1970s through these forced sterilization campaigns that ended up marginalizing some of the poorest people in the country. And to us, it's just so ironic in a way that that's what the government thought that they had to turn to in order to stabilize or reduce the population was to actually forcibly prevent people from having children instead of realizing that the foundation of population growth was actually based on a form of reproductive control, which is pronatalism. And that if only governments around the world could look at the ways in which they could neutralize pronatalism and actually start to give people, especially women, more reproductive autonomy to truly, authentically empower people, you know, men and women alike, to begin to engage in this discussion in a more egalitarian way.
Amrita Nandy 1:03:13
Yeah, and I think the state and the governments have been unable to do so because they themselves are part of the system that believes in patriarchy, that believes in gendered lives, and believes in pronatalism. So where does one even begin walking that talk? Because the people who are the faces of the government, of the state, are one of us and they carry pronatalist, patriarchal values, they believe in gender. And so the solution that they see is furthering control. Owning women's bodies, as if they weren't owned enough by their male relatives, be it their fathers who restrict their sexuality when they're adolescent girls, or their husbands who control their bodies post-marriage, or judges who think that marital rape isn't even rape. So where does one begin that conversation? You see that women and their bodies and the meaning of their lives is controlled by all of these agents of patriarchy, agents of the market, agents of the state, who control the very language and knowledge and discourse of patriarchy and norms. I think we're still at that stage. And I'm not limiting myself to India here. It's true for a lot of our cultures that children are seen as a major primary, perhaps the highest, most meaningful human pursuit, and therefore it's really paradigm-shifting. It's like a seismic suggestion. I think questioning pronatalism is a node that a lot of us haven't yet come to. And for us to come to that node requires making a journey that's not necessarily through sexual and reproductive rights discourse. I think it requires deeper digging. I think it requires also some contemplative reflection, some bigger questions about human life, human purpose, and the more-than-human companionship that we have, which requires a completely radical overhaul of how we imagine ourselves on the planet. It requires the very undoing of how centered our lives are on human growth, and humans themselves. It requires a very different vision, it requires different dreams, a different imagination of life, and not just human life. And we're definitely not there yet, even within the rights-base circles. So yeah, for some of us, this is frustrating and disappointing. But well, we'll have to give it more time. And that more time could be very late for the planet and for the very children that we're making and raising, but til we are able to see it, there's little we can do.
Nandita Bajaj 1:08:37
Alright. Well, that seems like such a profound note to end this discussion on. Yeah, thank you. And we're grateful for this really meaningful and touching conversation that we had with you today. And also grateful that you're joining us as our advisor and bringing all of the more spiritual, contemplative work. Congratulations to the brave, courageous work that you're doing.
Amrita Nandy 1:09:12
Yes. And I send you, Nandita, and you, Alan and the entire team I send you my congratulations. This is brave work. This is urgent work. And there are, even though we're a miniscule lot right now, I think we must keep going. Because there is no other way. And you know, in the darkest of times, I think even the flicker of the candle is enough for us to keep going. And so more power to all of you, and it's been great to have you across borders share your ideas to be able to talk and feel understood that we're on the same page. That just gives one hope and the desire to go on. It's been such a pleasure. It's a deep honor to have this conversation with all of you, and really looking forward to contributing to this discourse in the little way that I can, and thank you for all the kindness and those generous words, Nandita.
Alan Ware 1:10:40
That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more, and to share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. And also to help expand our listenership, please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:11:07
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
